"If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the
animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel
nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest
lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."
Samuel Adams, (1722-1803)

WILLISTON, N.D.—From the looks of it, the nation’s boomtown is still
booming. Big rigs, cement mixers and oil tankers still clog streets
built for lighter loads. The air still smells like diesel fuel and looks
like a dust bowl— all that traffic — and natural gas flares, wasted
byproducts of the oil wells, still glare out at the night sky like
bonfires.Not to mention that Walmart, still the main game in town, can’t seem
to get a handle on its very long lines and half­ empty shelves.But life at the center of the country’s largest hydraulic fracturing,
or fracking, boom has definitely changed. The jobs that brought
thousands of recession­-weary employment­-seekers to this once peaceful
corner of western North Dakota over the last five years have been drying
up, even as the unemployed keep coming.Downtown, clutches of men pass their time at the Salvation Army,
watching movies or trolling Craigslist ads on desktop computers. The
main branch of the public library is full, all day, every day, with
unemployed men in cubbyholes. And when the Command Center, a private
temporary jobs agency, opens every morning at 6am, between two and three
dozen people are waiting to get in the door.Some of these job seekers are sleeping in their trucks, in utility
sheds, behind piles of garbage by the railroad tracks, wherever they can
curl up.Only a year ago, Williston’s shale oil explosion was still gushing
jobs. From 2010 to 2014, thanks to the Bakken shale oil patch, it was
the fastest growing small city in the nation. Williston nearly tripled
in size, from 12,000 to 35,000 people. But the number of active rigs
used to drill new wells in the Bakken dropped to 111 in March, the
lowest number since April 2010, according to state figures. Low oil
prices have prompted drilling to slow down, and companies big and small
have been laying off workers and cutting hours.City officials paint a rosy picture. They cite North Dakota Job
Service reports that maintain there are 116 jobs in Williston for every
100 residents, point to North Dakota’s ranking among oil­-producing
states (number two, after Texas), call the oil production slowdown a
blip and say the oil patch is still growing.But the city’s job numbers do not match the reality on the ground. At
the Command Center, oil jobs have dropped by 10 percent since last
Fall, said Kyle Tennessen, the branch manager. Compounding the job
shortage, laid-­off oil workers were competing with others for
construction jobs and everything else, Tennessen added.Some migrants have already left, or are planning to, according to the
local U­Haul companies. They report fewer people renting vans and
trucks to move into town and more laid­-off workers renting vehicles to
move out.The rest are becoming Williston’s version of day laborers. They
compete for low­-paying jobs such as picking up trash, doing laundry and
mopping floors, that make enough for them to eat, but not enough to
afford a place to live. (The average one­-bedroom apartment in Williston
costs $2,395 a month.)Some live in one room with several other men, pooling resources and
splitting costs. Others don’t know where they’ll sleep from one night to
the next.The Salvation Army has offered stranded workers a one­-way ticket
back home. But many job seekers seem unwilling to leave—at least not
until they can make a success out of their sacrificial move to a place
with six months of winter, the worst traffic they’ve ever seen, and a
disgruntled, if not miserable, populace.“You just have to cowboy up and expect things to get better,” said
Terry Ray Cover, a 56­-year-­old farmer and jack­-of-­all-­trades who
came from southeast Iowa on a Greyhound bus in November. He’d heard
North Dakota was raining jobs.“They don’t tell you it’s all a lie,” he said, sipping coffee in the
Salvation Army on a frigid day in early March. “Places advertise jobs
and then tell you they’re not hiring.”The jobs he sees ads for, Cover said, require certifications and
degrees, “like engineering.” He had found odd jobs, one at a cattle
ranch, since he arrived in Williston. But he hadn’t worked in four
weeks, despite daily treks to the Command Center.Cover, bundled in a ski suit, had spent the most frigid nights of
winter (­20 Fahrenheit) in a tin shelter he discovered within walking
distance of the Command Center, his best hope for work. He was relying
on the Salvation Army for his daily bread and new friends for his daily
smokes.The men—they are all men—hanging out at the Salvation Army for
coffee, bread and whatever donated goods there might be on a given day
(from 9am to 3pm) have come from all over, including Iowa, Minnesota,
Montana, Louisiana, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. They include a
number of African immigrants originally from Liberia, Sierra Leone,
Nigeria and Senegal.But their stories are close to the same. They heard Williston had
jobs, and they weren’t having any luck back home. So they hopped in
their truck, or a Greyhound bus, and hopped off to a rude awakening.Most of the men, who range in age from their early 30s to late 50s,
have spent 10 nights, the maximum allowed, at a 10­-bed emergency
shelter the Salvation Army and a local church set up, leasing 10 beds at
a camp for oil workers (a so-­called man camp). More than 100 men
applied to stay at the emergency shelter since it resumed operating for
the second year in November. (It was set to close March 31 but has
extended its season due to demand.)Although there is camaraderie among the migrants, they are openly
frustrated, and the room where they hang out at the Salvation Army is
often tense and gloomy. Men who have been sleeping outside in the
elements, or trying to, fold themselves into corners to get real sleep.
The African immigrants tend to hang together, but a lot of loners fill
the room.Ali Singa, who moved to North Dakota from Nashville nine months ago,
started out in Fargo, making $11 an hour the day after he arrived in
shipping. He stayed for three months before heading to Williston, where
he heard he could make more money, enough to send to his wife and three
children in Sierra Leone.He found work in a nearby oil patch town, Watford City, hauling
water, but he was laid off in December and has not been able to land
another job. “A lack of a job has trapped me here,” Singa said. “Right
now, I’m staying with friends. I’m in a very bad situation. You must put
this down in your report: At the same time that they’re advertising
jobs, they’re laying people off, and people keep coming and keep
coming.”Singa, a high school French teacher in his native country, moved to
Washington, D.C. from the Sierra Leone 10 years ago, seeking a better
life for his family back home. But after being laid off from a baggage
handler job, he has not had much luck with his relocations.“Had I stayed home I would’ve been better off by now,” he said. “But
hope has kept me here, because hope is the poor man’s bread. Why can’t I
get a job? I don’t have any felonies, no arrests. I am a good person.
It’s the strangest thing. Is it because of the color of my skin? I tell
people back home to not come here.”Singa leaves to find work every morning at 5:30, and is usually the
first one to arrive at the Command Center. But jobs are not doled out on
a first­-come basis. They are handed out based on qualifications, and
rankings workers have received from employers, Kyle Tennessen said. That
works against the newest workers, without a hiring history.On a recent typical morning, Tennessen doled out seven day
jobs—restaurant work, construction site clean­up, maintenance­­—leaving
22 people who’d arrived before daybreak with no work for another day.One of them happened to be a woman. Louise Provus, 50, moved from
Spokane to Williston two years ago with her husband, Randy Fleming, 57.
“For the first two years,” she said, “I had a job at the local dry
cleaners. In April, I started working for a cleaning company as a
domestic. But that’s just once a week now, so I’m still looking.”Fleming, who lost an automotive shop in Spokane to fire, has been
looking for work doing anything. But he has not landed a permanent job.
“I’ve got like 40 applications out there,” he said. “I’ve been in here
all week. And some days, I’ve been in here all day, just in case. We’ll
come here at six and I’ll stay till two or three in the afternoon. Then
I’ll take the heel­toe express home.”He and his wife are among the luckier regulars at the Command Center.
They found an apartment in subsidized senior housing for $600 a month.
Even so, Provus said, they struggle to pay the rent. “I think I’ll go to
the library after this and put in an application at Walmart,” she said.Walmart has had the same sign out front advertising jobs at $17 an hour for three years, despite hiring freezes.“I know it’s a long shot,” Provus said. “Make sure you tell people
that if you get any job out here, no matter how bad, you’d better take
it, because it’s the best you’re going to get.”

Monday, March 30, 2015

As Iran talks appear to be coming to a close with a successful
agreement that would both lead to the lifting of international sanctions
and restrictions that would prevent the country from obtaining nuclear
weapons, most in the international community are relieved.Yet
Republicans have teamed up with their counterparts in the Israeli
political system to do everything they can to obstruct a deal – with
tactics such as drafting new sanctions legislation and warning the
Iranian leadership that the nuclear agreement will not outlast President
Obama.But this past week Senator John McCain (R-AZ) ratcheted up
this sabotage to a new level. During a floor speech he gave on March
24th, the senator suggested that Israel “go rogue” and that if they
don't they may not survive the next 22 months of the Obama presidency:

McCAIN: The
Israelis will need to chart their own path of resistance. On the
Iranian nuclear deal, they may have to go rogue. Let's hope their
warnings have not been mere bluffs. Israel survived its first 19 years
without meaningful U.S. patronage. For now, all it has to do is get
through the next 22, admittedly long, months..........................

Sunday, March 29, 2015

In a classic case of “unintended consequences,” the recently signed Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) in Indiana may have opened the door for the establishment of the First Church of Cannabis in the Hoosier State.While Governor Mike Pence (R) was holding a signing ceremony for the
bill allowing businesses and individuals to deny services to gays on
religious grounds or values, paperwork for the First Church of Cannabis
Inc. was being filed with the Secretary of State’s office, reports RTV6.Church founder Bill Levin announced on his Facebook page that the church’s registration has been approved,
writing, “Status: Approved by Secretary of State of Indiana –
“Congratulations your registration has been approved!” Now we begin to
accomplish our goals of Love, Understanding, and Good Health.”Levin is currently seeking $4.20 donations towards his non-profit church.According to Indiana attorney and political commentator Abdul-Hakim Shabazz,
Indiana legislators, in their haste to protect the religious values and
practices of their constituents, may have unwittingly put the state in
an awkward position with those who profess to smoke pot as a religious
sacrament.Shabazz pointed out that it is still illegal to smoke pot in Indiana,
but wrote, “I would argue that under RFRA, as long as you can show that
reefer is part of your religious practices, you got a pretty good shot
of getting off scot-free.”Noting that RFRA supporters say the bill “Only spells out a test as
to whether a government mandate would unduly burden a person’s faith and
the government has to articulate a compelling interest for that rule
and how it would be carried out in the least restrictive manner,”
Shabazz contends the law may tie the state’s hands.“So, with that said, what ‘compelling interest’ would the state of
Indiana have to prohibit me from using marijuana as part of my religious
practice?” he asked. ” I would argue marijuana is less dangerous than
alcohol and wine used in religious ceremonies. Marijuana isn’t anymore
‘addictive’ than alcohol and wine is used in some religious ceremonies.
And marijuana isn’t any more of a ‘gateway’ drug than the wine used in a
religious ceremony will make you go out any buy hard liquor. (At least
not on Sunday.)”Shabazz concluded, “I want a front row seat at the trial that we all know is going to happen when all this goes down.”

INDIANAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report)—In a
history-making decision, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana has signed into law a
bill that officially recognizes stupidity as a religion.Pence
said that he hoped the law would protect millions of state residents
“who, like me, have been practicing this religion passionately for
years.”The bill would grant politicians like
Pence the right to observe their faith freely, even if their practice of
stupidity costs the state billions of dollars.While
Pence’s action drew the praise of stupid people across America, former
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer was not among them. “Even I wasn’t dumb
enough to sign a bill like that,” she said.

Friday, March 27, 2015

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) said Friday that supporters of Sen. Ted Cruz
(R-TX) had inundated his office with "vulgar, rabid and adolescent-type
phone calls" ever since he criticized the presidential candidate earlier
this week, the Washington Post reported.

"The puerile language used is what most kids outgrow and move beyond
when they reach sophomore year in high school," King wrote in a post on
his Facebook page Friday morning. "Clearly, these Cruz supporters suffer
from severe cases of arrested development." King said it was "particularly shameful" that women and interns in
his office had been subjected to the callers' "perverse rantings." He said that Cruz was not responsible for all of his supporters'
actions, but added: "Frankly, I can not imagine supporters of Jeb Bush,
Scott Walker, Lindsey Graham, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, or other
candidates reacting so disgracefully."A spokesman for Cruz declined to comment to the Washington Post. On Monday, King said that Cruz was more like a "carnival barker" than the leader of the free world...................

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday he regretted
offending Israel’s Arabs during a rallying call on election day last
week that his critics had denounced as racist.In a video clip posted on his Facebook page,
Netanyahu told representatives of Israel’s Arab community: “I know that
the things I said a few days ago offended Israel’s Arabs. I had no
intention for this to happen, I regret this.”Fearing his voters would stay home, Netanyahu, who
won a surprise election victory last Tuesday and is set to head a new
government, accused left-wing organizations of bussing Arab-Israelis to
the polls “in droves” to vote against him.“The rule of the right is in danger,” he said at the time.Speaking to the group of Israeli Arabs at his
official residence in Jerusalem on Monday, Netanyahu said: “I consider
myself as prime minister of each one of you, of all Israel’s citizens,
regardless of religion, race or gender.”While he got a warm reception from those present, his
comments were rejected by Ayman Odeh, leader of the Joint Arab List,
which secured 13 seats at last week’s election to become the third
largest force in parliament.“We do not accept this apology. It was to a group of
elders and not to the elected leadership of Israel’s Arabs … I want to
see actions, how is he going to manifest this apology? … will he advance
equality?” Odeh told Israel’s Channel 10.Israeli Arabs make up around 20 percent of the country’s eight-million-strong population.They are descendants of residents who stayed put
during the 1948 war of Israel’s founding, in which hundreds of thousands
of fellow Palestinians fled or were forced to leave their homes, ending
up in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria as well as in the occupied West Bank,
Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz, one of
three Cuban-Americans in the Senate, is throwing his hat into the ring
for the 2016 presidential race today. Cruz has made a career out of
slamming President Obama for being weak and presiding over the collapse
of countries like Yemen (as though Cruz could have done anything about
that if he had been president.I
figure if you total them all up, Cruz has called for six or seven
strong US interventions abroad, whether in the form of invasions, air
strikes, or covert coups d’etat. It is hard to tell exactly, since he
doesn’t typically demonstrate any detailed knowledge of the situation
and just wants to take a “strong posture” rather than detailing any
practical steps.Ted Cruz appears to insist that Iran entirely cease its civilian nuclear enrichment program, which Cruz believes to be aimed at creating a warhead. “ Iran must stop or we will stop them,”
he says. Cruz attempted to derail President Obama’s negotiations with
Iran aimed at ensuring that the program remains purely civilian. The
alternative to those negotiations is ultimately a war. The only
plausible way to make Iran cease producing enriched uranium as fuel for
its nuclear reactors is to invade it and overthrow its government a la
Iraq. So, war then.Not satisfied with taking steps against Iran that would likely lead to hostilities, Cruz warns that Iran will not only get a nuclear bomb but will give it to Venezuela.
He hints around that President Nicolas Maduro should be overthrown
before that can happen. Venezuela has a strong class divide, with Maduro
supporting the working classes and his opponents aiming at returning
power to the country’s wealthy elite. Cruz is with the latter.Cruz’s response to the rise of Daesh (ISIL, ISIS) in Iraq
is to “bomb them back to the stone age” and to annihilate them within a
couple of months. Gen. Dempsey told him that was not possible (you
can’t defeat a guerrilla movement from the air, and intensive bombing of
Daesh territory would just kill thousands of civilians in cities like
Mosul). Cruz issued a press release saying Dempsey doesn’t know what he
is talking about. His first priority in fighting ISIL, he said, was to
close the border with Mexico to prevent infiltration. Bombing Iraq
intensely probably counts as fighting a war.Cruz wants to fight a proxy war with the Russian Federation by arming Ukrainian fighters.Cruz wants to wage an economic war on the Palestinians, seeking to halt all US aid to the Palestine Authority of Mahmoud Abbas.In
a way the most dangerous Ted Cruz war of all is on the earth’s
environment, since he favors increasing the carbon dioxide being put
into the atmosphere by humans burning fossil fuels and is a global
warming denialist. Given that humanity has only a couple of decades to
make the changes necessary to keep warming in the 3.5 degrees F. range
(already pretty bad), a Cruz presidency would probably be enough in and
of itself to drive us to a five degree increase.

(Juan
Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the
University of Michigan. This column was posted first at JuanCole.com)

Sunday, March 22, 2015

Following an announcement on Twitter, Texas Senator Ted Cruz (R) is
expected to deliver some news “around midnight” tonight, and all eyes
are turned towards Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va. where the
divisive, but self-assured, lawmaker is to announce his entry into the
2016 GOP presidential field.The New York Times
is reporting Cruz decided to jump into the field now before potential
opponents – Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Kentucky Senator Rand
Paul — make their announcements.According to Republican strategist Dave Carney, “There’s an advantage
to being first. He’s now the only one running for president, instead of
engaging in this Kabuki dance that the others are.”Under the hashtag #TedCruzCampaignSlogans,
Twitter was abuzz with suggested campaign slogans, and artwork,
calling attention to everything from famous Cruz quotes to references to
his birthplace in Canada...................

Saturday, March 21, 2015

It is beginning to seem as though the rush beyond judgment is tilting
against a Hillary Clinton presidential choice; “too much baggage” is
usually the explanation.
Part of what is still to be done is removing factoids from influential
power, what Hillary Clinton once correctly called “a vast right-wing
conspiracy.” That’s more than a mouthful.
I once observed: “When she testified last week for seven hours before
the congressional committee and was not swayed by the nipping of rubber
teeth attempting to wound, I thought of seeing her in person at an
unannounced appearance following Nelson Mandela 10 years or so ago.
“The audience did not know she was there until Clinton turned the
microphone into a flamethrower. Suddenly, the little woman who could not
be recognized from a distance sent forward a voice that all had heard
but not that way. She spoke about getting up off the canvas, because a
real champion knows what it takes. No matter how often or how much one
has been hurt, an unfair opponent will be sent back to the opposite
corner with a pocket full of defeat.
“Sometimes, when a bear is being pursued and decides to stand up and
fight it out with those hunters, the bear will be slightly distracted by
some little dogs biting at its paw. The dogs will be hurled into a tree
if unlucky, and perhaps killed.
“Those who refer to Bill Clinton as ‘the big dog’ now know Hillary
Clinton is a twin not to be messed with; she has earned her spurs in
every way possible, and knows how to use them.”
That may have been true when she spoke about what had happened in
Benghazi on the night the Republicans have turned into a factoid
scandal; repeating supposed “fact” about incompetence at the top. The
bullhorn of exaggeration, lodged in the national throat, needs to be
spat out.
No matter the plundering of the environment, recurring disasters
transporting the muck of dirty oil, the disruption of trust for our
banks that began with the Great Recession, and the distracting
entertainment of racial protests, the supposed redneck vision stays in
place, shifting as much as possible to maintain controlling power.
I see embarrassing examples of intellectual failure on the parts of the
Republican elected lawmakers, who seem to be sure that Americans can be
manipulated by the claims of dangerous people in the federal government,
from the very top to the very bottom. These claims of reruns being in
place come from elected men like Ted Cruz of Texas, Louie Gohmert of
Texas and Rick Perry of Texas. Cruz is a bad photocopy of Sen. Joe
McCarthy, even though McCarthy was elected in Wisconsin; Gohmert is a
blustering man possessed of the gall to talk down Attorney General Eric
Holder; Perry always seems somewhat soft in the head, regardless of how
long he was seated in the governor’s chair of the Lone Star State.
This is happening while American cities are facing or assenting to
female leadership, which is a very serious answer to the failures of
low-level thinkers among the GOP women like Sarah Palin and Michele
Bachmann, longtime drivers of what Chris Matthews calls “the clown car.”
Hillary Clinton will not be run down by the clown car while crossing the street.
It may or may not be her time. If it is, she and the country will
benefit, perhaps on the level of what Angela Merkel has brought to
Germany, raising a nation through the brutal memories of 20th-century
history very effectively. If it is not her time, everything seems to be
coming to a point in which the pimple of bigotry and its Siamese twin
greed and corruption will pop because Republicans followed what Richard
Nixon called the “Southern strategy.”
Pimples break but do not maintain the unpleasant look and feeling. This
is almost guaranteed by the presence of brilliant politicians and
powerhouse executives like Loretta Lynch, Claire McCaskill and Elizabeth
Warren, who symbolically match the Michael Brown family with heat,
determination and superbly responsible thinking. Even Big Oil is about
to stub its toe in New Jersey because of Gov. Chris Christie, having
become too slick to hide like a hog in a blanket. Squeals are on the
way.Stanley Crouch can be reached by email at crouch.stanley@gmail.com

Conservative provocateur James O'Keefe allegedly instructed an
undercover operative to goad Black Lives Matter protesters with
statements like "I wish I could just kill some of these cops," according
to one of his ex-employees.

Richard Valdes, the former director of special operations for
O'Keefe's organization Project Veritas, told TPM on Thursday that the
guerrilla filmmaker wanted an undercover operative to infiltrate a rally
held by the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network in mid-January.
At the time, Black Lives Matter demonstrators were still taking to the
streets of New York City to protest a grand jury’s decision not to
indict an NYPD officer in the chokehold death of Eric Garner.Valdes said O'Keefe dictated a script to him and then told him to
email it to the operative for use at the rally. Here's the full text of
that script, according to emails provided to TPM by Valdes' attorney:

As a minority and a Muslim, I know what it's like
when the police treat me unfairly. They have even searched my little
daughter's body. Can you believe that? Do you know what it's like to
have your rights violated because of the color of your skin or because
of your name? -PAUSE-Sometimes, I wish I could just kill some of these cops. Don't you
just wish we could have one of the cops right here in the middle of our
group? -PAUSE-What would you do if we could get Officer Pantoleo (who killed Eric Garner) right here in this crowd? What would you do to him?

In a Jan. 9 email addressed to Valdes, O'Keefe, and other top Project
Veritas employees, the undercover operative, Mohammed Alhomsi,
apparently declined to carry out the assignment. The email cited both
legal concerns and concerns about the language of the script in turning
down the project. That email was among those provided to TPM by Valdes's
attorney."I will not be able to say anything that's not the truth to the best
of my knowledge. Especially when it comes to the way I was treated as a
Muslim in the United States," Alhomsi wrote, according to a copy of the
email. "And I will not say words that will jeopardize my entity,
especially when they involve an illegal act of murdering police."Valdes then reminded Alhomsi that the assignment wasn't different
from previous projects where the operative had put on a ruse. But he
didn't press the issue further, writing that "we respect your position
and don't want you to be uncomfortable.""It struck a nerve with me as well," Valdes told TPM. "I have two
brothers that are retired NYPD. Myself, I served as a volunteer police
officer in Essex County, N.J. I understood it, and I was told, ‘Just
make it happen.’ I refused."For that, Valdes said, he was called into O'Keefe's office a half hour later and fired from the organization. As the New York Post first reported, Valdes is now planning to sue Project Veritas and O'Keefe for wrongful termination.“The best that I can do is deduce from the facts of what happened
that this is just retaliation towards me for not toeing the James
O’Keefe line,” Valdes told TPM.It wouldn’t be the first time a former Project Veritas employee has
taken legal action against O’Keefe. The organization’s former executive
director, Dan Francisco, sued Project Veritas and O’Keefe in January 2014 for wrongful termination and defamation, respectively.In his suit, Francisco alleged that Project Veritas failed to pay him
for his final week of employment. Valdes told TPM that he wasn’t paid
for his last week of work at Project Veritas, either.TPM reached out to O’Keefe on Thursday for comment on Valdes’ version
of events and on the supposed language in the undercover operative’s
script. O’Keefe passed the inquiry on to a spokesman.“We can confirm that Rich Valdes is a former employee but beyond that
we do not publicly discuss employment related matters,” spokesman
Daniel Pollock wrote to TPM on Thursday in an email. “As to the alleged
emails, we do not comment on past, present or future real, or imagined,
investigations.”That statement differed from what Pollock told the New York Post. “Project Veritas would never do anything that we believe would incite
violence against police officers. Anyone suggesting otherwise is
clearly unfamiliar with our body of work,” Pollock told the newspaper.Valdes said he believed that O'Keefe's feathers may have been ruffled
when Alhomsi wrote that that he wanted a written record of his and the
Project Veritas employees' conversations on the assignment."I think it made James pretty nervous," he told TPM.Alhomsi did not respond to a request for comment from TPM.Prior to joining Project Veritas in early 2014, Valdes worked in
community outreach and marketing for New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's
(R) administration and as a political writer for The Washington Times,
according to his LinkedIn page.Valdes told TPM that he thought O'Keefe's work had been getting more
news-oriented in his time with the organization, but he suggested the
planned stunt with the protesters crossed a line."[Alhomsi] felt that what we were asking him to do was manipulating
poor people -- and on the phone, he emphasized poor black people -- into
saying something that would benefit James’ bottom line," he told TPM.
"That opened my eyes.""This story was more on the controversial side," he later added. "Had
it come out the way it was planned at that time, I think it would’ve
been torn to shreds in the media and made the organization look less
than credible."

This week, President Obama discussed some of the most pressing global
matters of our time: ISIS, climate change, nuclear deals, and...weed.
As in, he begrudgingly discussed the potential federal legalization of
marijuana. I say begrudgingly, because the president made it clear that
he thinks young people these days have misplaced their priorities.
Instead of thinking about marijuana, they should be thinking about
things like climate change.

The president is correct. Not just young folks, but all of us, should
be thinking about climate change and disruption. Through our continued
apathy, the atmosphere now contains unprecedented levels of carbon
dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, resulting in increases in
atmospheric and oceanic temperature, more intense storms, melting ice
caps, acidifying oceans and rising sea levels, which threatens our very
existence. But what if we think about the climate and marijuana at the same time?By some estimates, indoor marijuana cultivation is accountable for
producing some 15 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually—the
equivalent to the amount of emissions produced by three million American
cars. Put another way, one single kilogram of processed marijuana is
responsible for the same amount of emissions as driving a 44 mpg car
across the country five times. How can this be? It’s due in most part to
the significant amount of electricity required to grow marijuana
indoors.With $6 billion in annual energy costs, the indoor marijuana industry
is one of the most, if not the most, energy-intensive industry in the
United States. It requires a large amount of electricity to power
high-intensity heat lamps, to regulate temperature and humidity levels,
and for ventilation, among other things. This energy consumption, which
is expected to grow as the industry grows, results in significant
greenhouse gas emissions. Under clandestine operations, indoor cultivators use inefficient and
carbon dioxide-spewing on-site diesel and gasoline generators to meet
their electricity needs. As states legalize indoor marijuana
cultivation, producers will connect to the grid, thereby eliminating the
need to use on-site generators. Unfortunately, connecting to the grid
will do little to alleviate marijuana’s impacts on the climate given
that at least two-thirds of the electricity transported on the grid is
generated by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.
Legalization will, however, provide policymakers with an opportunity to
assess the industry’s energy usage and evaluate its climate risks.One way to ensure that the industry does not further contribute to an
already dire situation is to require indoor marijuana cultivators to
utilize only carbon-free electricity as a condition of licensing. Before
you dismiss that as crazy talk, Boulder City and Boulder County in
Colorado have done just that. To obtain and maintain, a license in
Boulder, an indoor cultivator must obtain its energy from a renewable
source. Cultivators can utilize on-site renewable generation, such as
rooftop solar panels; subscribe to the Community Solar Garden; or find
some other approved equivalent source. Opponents may argue that this type of requirement is too expensive
for cultivators and that it will encourage illicit operations. No doubt
public policymakers need to be careful in their restrictions so as to
not cause unintended results. However, requiring indoor cultivators to
use only climate-friendly electricity is unlikely to have this negative
effect. First, gasoline and diesel generators are inefficient and
expensive to run. It is unlikely that these on-site generators would be
more cost effective than utilizing renewable energy.Second, if the lifting of Prohibition is any indicator, it’s unlikely
that the increased requirement would result in continued or increased
clandestine operations. After Prohibition, the alcohol industry became a
highly regulated as well as a highly lucrative industry with few
illegal operations. Likewise, legitimate marijuana cultivators stand to
make significant profits by maintaining their licenses.I don’t mean to unfairly single out the billion-dollar marijuana
industry for bearing this extra burden while other industries get off
scot-free. The indoor marijuana industry just provides a good example of
the need for a climate risk assessment prior to licensing, and an
opportunity for public policymakers to make a difference when starting
from a clean slate. The marijuana industry is already on its way to
becoming a highly-regulated industry. It already requires stakeholders
to jump through many hoops on the way to licensing. I simply encourage
policymakers to consider one higher priority: the use of
climate-friendly electricity.Gina S. Warren is an Associate Professor at Texas A&M
University School of Law. This Op-ed is based on her article entitled, “Regulating Pot to Save the Polar Bear: Energy and Climate Impacts of the Marijuana Industry,” which will appear in Volume 40 of the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law (2015).

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Tennessee Republican state Sen. Bo Watson warned on Tuesday that a
plan to bring 200,000 jobs to his state was a “magnet for unionized
labor, intentionally.”According to Chattanooga Times Free Press,
Watson told the state Senate Commerce Committee that approving $165.8
million in tax incentives for Volkswagen was dangerous because unions
could change the “culture” of Tennessee.“I hope the committee will take some time to fully vet this incentive
offer,” Watson advised. “At the end of the day, we can have no buyer’s
remorse.”“The incentive, no doubt, will create about 200,000 jobs directly,
and countless more indirectly,” he admitted. “It will give southeast
Tennessee a big foothold in the automotive industry, particularly in
research and development. And it will allow the development of a new
line of Volkswagen vehicles, particularly the SUV.”But Watson asserted that the threat of organized labor unions might
not be worth the benefits that Volkswagen would bring to the state.“VW is a magnet for organized labor, intentionally,” he opined. “I
believe this committee should know and understand what Volkswagen’s
position is on this issue, both here and in Germany.”The Chattanooga Republican turned to several Volkswagen officials and
demanded that they explain why the vice chairman of VW’s European and
Global Group Works Council had pledged to spread the United Auto Workers
“far beyond Tennessee.”David Geanacopoulos, the CEO of Volkswagen Group of America’s
Chattanooga operations, explained to Watson that VW Works Council was an
elected organization that was mandated by German law and that it was
independent from company management.“We believe it is a question for our employees to decide,”
Geanacopoulos said. “We have actually established a new policy in the
company that allows us to have conversations with any labor organization
that has support from our workforce. Not about collective bargaining.
It’s not about union representation.”Watson agreed that Volkswagen had been “nothing more than transformational” for the Chattanooga area.“There is no doubt about that. Our city, our county, the surrounding
counties have been incredibly impacted,” the lawmaker noted. “Mostly for
the positive, but that transformation can also involve other aspects of
our communities and our culture.”In the end, Watson declined to support the tax incentives and
abstained from voting. The remaining members of the committee approved
the measure by a vote of 8-0.......................

(Reuters) - A Missouri man was charged on Tuesday with threatening
several times to shoot U.S. President Barack Obama in meetings with an
informant and an undercover officer who posed as a member of a white
supremacist group, prosecutors said.Cameron James Stout, 24, of Stover was arrested on Tuesday and
remains in custody after an initial appearance in U.S. District Court in
Jefferson City, Missouri's capital, prosecutors said.An informant told a Morgan County sheriff's deputy that Stout had
asked him on Thursday for a high-powered rifle and assistance in a plan
to shoot the president in the next few weeks, an affidavit attached to
the criminal complaint said.Over the next few days, the informant, a former member of the Aryan
Nation, met with Stout and agreed to put him in touch with a
high-ranking member of the organization who could help him obtain a
rifle and plan the attack, the affidavit said.Stout drew diagrams of the Washington, D.C. area and talked about
possible positions from which he could fire at the White House or a
church the president attends, the affidavit said.The Missouri man also told the informant he had loaned out a
.270-caliber rifle with a scope, but had gotten it back and planned to
use it in the crime, the affidavit said.On Tuesday, Stout told the informant and an undercover officer who
was posing as an Aryan Nation superior that he planned to shoot Obama
the next time the president appeared in Kansas City, the affidavit said.A U.S. magistrate judge ordered Stout held in a brief appearance on Tuesday. A detention hearing is set for Thursday.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

A former employee says conservative activist James O’Keefe tried to
instigate anti-police sentiment among protesters through the use of a
mole, the New York Post reported.The former director of operations for Project Veritas, Richard
Valdes, said O’Keefe planned to send an unidentified Muslim man working
for him to infiltrate a group of demonstrators in January. Neither the
protest he was supposed to join nor the location have been identified. The man was also allegedly given a script to recite at meetings, in
which he would say, “Sometimes, I wish I could just kill some of these
cops. Don’t you just wish we could have one of the cops right here in
the middle of our group?”However, the man reportedly emailed both Valdes and O’Keefe that month and refused the assignment.“I will not say words that will jeopardize my entity, especially when
they involve an illegal act of ‘murdering police,’” he wrote.Valdes told the Post that O’Keefe subsequently fired him for “being unwilling to strong-arm the guy to do his dirty work.”According to his LinkedIn profile,
Valdes worked for Veritas for one year, calling it “an educational
non-profit dedicated to informing the public by producing investigative
video-journalism and public affairs programming focused on political
corruption, hypocrisy, government waste and fraud.”“I oversee certain special projects ranging from supervising field
operations and recruiting staff, to contributing to media releases,
research, and producing original video content,” he stated regarding his
duties.However, Valdes has since threatened to file a wrongful termination
suit against Veritas. A spokesperson for the organization, Dan Pollack,
denied his allegation.“Project Veritas would never do anything that we believe would incite
violence against police officers. Anyone suggesting otherwise is
clearly unfamiliar with our body of work,” Pollak told the Post.

Saturday, March 14, 2015

Her impassioned denunciation of war stole the show at a mass rally calling for Benjamin Netanyahu’s ousting.

Now Michal Kastan-Keidar – a war widow who became a reluctant overnight star of Israel’s general election campaign–
has revealed how she personally pleaded with the Israeli prime minister
to ensure Israel would not fight any future wars with the Palestinians.

But Mr Netanyahu – while
sympathetic – failed to understand, said Mrs Kastan-Keidar, 38, who was
catapulted into the public eye when she addressed tens of thousands of
people in Tel Aviv’s symbolic Rabin Square last Saturday, urging them to
use next Tuesday’s election to elect the candidate most likely to
prevent war.

“I came here to
request of you, when you go to cast your ballots, to vote for who will
prevent the next war,” she told the crowd, after revealing her grief
over the death of her husband in last summer’s bloody war in Gaza.

Last week’s rally gave added impetus to an apparent popular groundswell
against Mr Netanyahu and his ruling Right-wing Likud party, further
reflected in successive recent opinion polls.

The two final surveys published on Friday beforenext week’s ballot showed the prime minister staring at defeat.
One poll commissioned by the mass circulation Yedioth Ahronoth
newspaper showed the Left-wing Zionist Union set to win 26 seats in the
120-seat Knesset (parliament), compared to 22 for Likud. A
separate poll in Ma’ariv newspaper showed a similar margin – with the
Zionist Union, fronted by Isaac Herzog, the Labour leader, on 25 seats
and Likud on 21. While Mrs Kastan-Keidar’s contribution to the
trend is unclear, her intervention in Saturday’s rally overshadowed the
main speaker, Meir Dagan, a former Mossad director, who attacked Mr
Netanyahu’s unremitting emphasis on the threat from Iran, the Israeli
leader’s main campaign issue, which has failed to resonate with ordinary
voters. Mrs Kastan-Keidar’s husband, Dolev, a lieutenant-colonel in the Israeli
army, was killed in a fire fight after intercepting Hamas militants who
infiltrated into Israel from Gaza last July, just days after persuading
commanding officers to let him leave a training exercise to join the
fighting. In an interview with The Telegraph, Mrs Kastan-Keidar,
a documentary film-maker and mother-of-three, described an awkward and
emotional conversation with Mr Netanyahu when he telephoned her to offer
condolences.

“I spoke about the need for peace,” she said. “I spoke like a little
girl. I said, Bibi [Mr Netanyahu’s childhood nickname], can I ask you
for something? Can you make sure there will be no more wars? “I
could hear the grief and responsibility in his voice. He did want a
ceasefire with Hamas. He was reluctant to send in ground forces.
“I’m not cynical. I don’t believe a leader doesn’t care about the lives
of his people and just sends them out to die. But he does nothing to
prevent it. I do think he feels responsible. He just doesn’t
understand.” Mrs Kastan-Keidar, who writes a regular blog for
Walla, an Israeli magazine, on coping with her bereavement, said she
requested speaking time at last week’s rally because of her belief in
the urgent need for a peace deal with the Palestinians.

Speaking to a nationally televised audience, she lamented an
election campaign that had virtually ignored last summer’s war – which
killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians and 73 on the Israeli side – and the
decades-long conflict between the two sides. “The conflict with
the Palestinians has taken too many lives and the only way to stop it is
to reach a peace agreement,” said Mrs Kastan-Keidar, a diminutive
figure who wears her own and her husband’s wedding rings attached to a
gold necklace. Her message seemed to gain added resonance for
being delivered in the same square where Yitzhak Rabin, the former prime
minister who signed the now-moribund Oslo peace accords, was
assassinated by a Right-wing Israeli in 1995. Yet it failed win
over Mr Netanyahu himself, who last weekend backtracked on his own
previous commitment to accepting a Palestinian state – made in a speech
to Tek Aviv’s Bar Ilan University in 2009. The speech was “no longer
relevant” because of the danger of such a state falling into radical
Islamist groups’ hands, he told journalists. Mrs Kastan-Keidar
also came under attack from a Right-wing journalist, Hagai Huberman, who
accused her in a widely-read article of “killing her husband and crying
that she is now a widow”.

Huberman later said his words were
not meant literally but referred to her belief in the peace process,
which he said led to more Israelis being killed. But peace with
the Palestinians has been raised in the campaign’s final days. Tzipi
Livni, the former foreign minister and joint leader of the Zionist Union
with Mr Herzog, told a rally in Beersheba this week that she would
revive peace talks. “I hope to go back to a direct dialogue with
the Palestinians, so we can have direct talks and the support of the
Arab countries that support us,” said Mrs Livni. “We need to get an
agreement that it’s not only a piece of paper but a change in the order
in the region.”

Friday, March 13, 2015

Plagued by prolonged drought, California now has only enough water to get it through the next year, according to NASA.

In an op-ed published Thursday by the Los Angeles Times,
Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in California, painted a dire picture of the state's water
crisis. California, he writes, has lost around 12 million acre-feet of
stored water every year since 2011. In the Sacramento and San Joaquin
river basins, the combined water sources of snow, rivers, reservoirs,
soil water and groundwater amounted to a volume that was 34 million
acre-feet below normal levels in 2014. And there is no relief in sight.

"As our 'wet' season draws to a close, it is clear that
the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic
drought conditions. January was the driest in California since
record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at
all-time lows" Famiglietti writes. "We're not just up a creek without a
paddle in California, we're losing the creek too."

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced
that one-third of the monitoring stations in California’s Cascades and
Sierra Nevada mountains have recorded the lowest snowpack ever measured.

"Right now the state has only about one year of water
supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply,
groundwater, is rapidly disappearing,” Famiglietti writes.

He criticized Californian officials for their lack of
long-term planning for how to cope with this drought, and future
droughts, beyond "staying in emergency mode and praying for rain."

Last month, new research by
scientists at NASA, Cornell University and Columbia University pointed
to a "remarkably drier future" for California and other Western states
amid a rapidly-changing climate. "Megadroughts,"
the study's authors wrote, are likely to begin between 2050 and 2099,
and could each last between 10 years and several decades.

With that future in mind, Famiglietti says, "immediate
mandatory water rationing" should be implemented in the state,
accompanied by the swift formation of regulatory agencies to rigorously
monitor groundwater and ensure that it is being used in a sustainable
way—as opposed to the "excessive and unsustainable" groundwater
extraction for agriculture that, he says, is partly responsible for
massive groundwater losses that are causing land in the highly irrigated
Central Valley to sink by one foot or more every year.

Various local ordinances
have curtailed excessive water use for activities like filling
fountains and irrigating lawns. But planning for California's "harrowing
future" of more and longer droughts "will require major changes in
policy and infrastructure that could take decades to identify and act
upon," Famiglietti writes. "Today, not tomorrow, is the time to begin."

His Holiness Pope Francis called upon candidates in his home nation
of Argentina to hold a “free, unfinanced campaign” during a question and
answer session with low-income youth from Buenos Aires. The Pope also
warned that campaign donations lead elected officials to act against the
interests of the people. “In the financing of electoral campaigns, many
interests get into the mix,” according to Francis, “and then they send you the bill.”The Pope’s comments place him at odds with five other very prominent
Catholics — the five justices who joined the Supreme Court’s decision in
Citizens United v. FEC.
That opinion did not simply deny that huge influxes of money can
corrupt elected officials, at least when that money goes to allegedly
independent groups such as super PACs; it even suggested that the use of
money to obtain greater access to politicians is an objective moral
good:

Favoritism and influence are not . . . avoidable in
representative politics. It is in the nature of an elected
representative to favor certain policies, and, by necessary corollary,
to favor the voters and contributors who support those policies. It is
well understood that a substantial and legitimate reason, if not the
only reason, to cast a vote for, or to make a contribution to, one
candidate over another is that the candidate will respond by producing
those political outcomes the supporter favors. Democracy is premised on
responsiveness.

The Pope also suggested that he would support a public financing
system, noting that such a method of funding elections “would allow for
me, the citizen, to know that I’m financing each candidate with a given
amount of money.” The same five conservative justices who decided Citizens United, however, have also made public financing virtually impossible to implement successfully in the United States. In Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett,
the Court struck down a public financing system which provides extra
funds to publicly financed candidates who become the target of large
amounts of campaign spending. Without such a mechanism, which allows
publicly financed candidates to defend against unexpected and
well-financed attacks from super PACs and the like, candidates will be extraordinarily reluctant to participate in public finance systems, which typically forbid candidates who participate in them from spending money that they raise outside of the system.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

The story of Arkansas state Rep. Justin Harris (R) — whose family
adopted a pair of girls then “re-homed” them to another household where
one of the girls was raped — has taken a bizarre turn with allegations
that the Harris family gave the girls up because they believed the
children could communicate telepathically and were possessed by demons.The Arkansas Times reported on Wednesday that sources close to the family dispute many of the assertions Harris and his wife Marsha made last Friday at a press conference at the Arkansas state capitol. The Harrises said they were never made aware that the girls were
violent or that they posed a risk to a household with other children.
Rep. Harris claimed that the family received no aid from the Department
of Human Services (DHS) and that when they attempted to make the agency
aware of issues with the girls, they threatened to charge him with child
abandonment. A bevy of witnesses — including, the Times said,
“two foster families who cared for the girls prior to the Harris
adoption, the girls’ biological mother, a former DHS employee familiar
with the proceedings and a former babysitter at the Harrises’ West Fork
home” — dispute virtually every word of the Harrises’ account of the
adoption and subsequent “re-homing” and rape. Babysitter Chelsey Goldsborough told the Times that when she
cared for the children in the home, she was alarmed at how the family
treated the girls, who initially arrived in the home with an older
sister. The Times, for the sake of clarity, gave the girls false names.The eldest, Jeannette, was 6 years old when the girls arrived in the
Harris home in the fall of 2012. The middle sister Mary was 4 and Annie,
the youngest, about 2 years old.Jeannette was the first of the girls to be cast out of the Harris
home. Rep. Harris says that she posed a threat to the three biological
sons the Harrises already had. The oldest girl was sent for treatment at
a state hospital while Mary and Annie remained with the family.Goldsborough told the Times that Mary was mostly confined to
her room and monitored by video camera. Marsha Harris told the
babysitter that the girls were demonically possessed and that they had
to be kept separate because they could communicate telepathically. One
of the girls crushed the family’s guinea pig to death, Marsha Harris
claimed, and the family were so frightened of the children that they
summoned an exorcist from Alabama to perform a casting-out of the girls’
demons.“The first night I was over there, I just broke down and cried with
this little girl because I just felt so bad for her,” said Goldsborough.
The Harrises used an elaborate system of locks, video cameras and
alarms to separate the girls because they believed they would kill their
entire family.Another source close to the family corroborated this account to the Times, saying that Marsha Harris regularly spoke of the demons she believed were living inside the adopted girls.“They consider it to be spiritual warfare,” the anonymous source
said. “I’m a Christian, and I have these beliefs, but this was
completely beyond anything I’ve ever seen or heard about.”The family locked Mary away without any books, toys or colorful
clothes, Goldsborough said, “because a demon told [Mary] not to
share…Demons told her to not appreciate [her toys] and all that, so they
took away all the toys and her colored clothes.”The Harrises’ attorney Jennifer Wells insisted there is no truth to
the allegations against her clients. “Exorcisms and telepathy are not
part of the Harrises’ religious practice,” Wells said. “They followed
the techniques in a book called When Love Is Not Enough, a Parent’s Guide to Reactive Attachment Disorder by Nancy Thomas, who is a recognized expert on therapeutic parenting techniques.”Other foster families who worked with the girls
say that the middle girl was never violent and that the Harrises were
warned multiple times that their family would not be a good fit for
children from such a traumatic background, which included neglect,
violent abuse and sexual molestation. However, the Harrises relied on their friend Cecile Blucker — a DHS
official — to push the adoption through in spite of the warnings and
serious misgivings on the part of state officials. The family’s response to the upset the children brought into their
home, however, was not to go back to DHS and attempt to get assistance,
but instead to rely on their Christian faith until things in the home
finally got so bad that they moved the girls into the home of Eric and
Stacey Francis. It was there that Mary was raped by Eric, a serial
predator who had molested other children and who is now serving a
40-year prison sentence.